This
article will show you how to set up openerp-server 5.0.0-3-1 +
openerp-client 5.0.0-3-1 + openerp-web 5.0.1 on Ubuntu Server 9.04 & Desktop 9.0.4

Introduction

Open
ERP (formerly named Tiny ERP) is the leader open-source ERP/CRM system
written mostly in Python and initiated in Belgium. It offers a
three-tier web architecture, ease of use and flexibility.

With more
than 1000 downloads per day, Open ERP is the most admired and the
world’s fastest growing and used free open source management software
solution in the world. Small and medium sized companies are now
encouraged to use ERP.

Open ERP
is very modular, each adoption produces new modules. So they can be
installed optionally or not, depending on the need of each enterprise.
More than 350 modules of different kinds are available: accounting,
finance, stock management, manufacturing, services management, customer
relations, sales, project management, document management, internal
organization, human resources, direct marketing, e-commerce, point of
sale, payroll,… And about 10-20 modules are produced monthly!

For Open
Source software, experience has shown that there’s no need to train
users for several months on the system, because they can just download
it and use it directly. To make this process of learning fast and
effective, Open ERP has taken several steps with its large partner
network and community e.g.
Forum and IRC which are platforms to discuss common topics among community and get help, Open ERP Planet is used to announce new developments in Open ERP, Launchpad is a unique collaboration and Bazaar code hosting platform for software projects. Other then these, detail Documentation is available which serve as a guide to understand and get started with Open ERP.

The latest version of OpenERP (5.0) was released inFebruary 10th 2009.
Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.0.4 is the first Linux distribution that provides this release.
We will probably have to wait a few months until other distributions
(Fedora 12, OpenSuSE 11.3, CentOS, etc) ease the latest updates of
OpenERP 5.x. Nevertheless, all these major distributions already offer
tinyerp-server and client release 4.2.3 (without including openerp-web).

Major troubles during the setup

The most complicated part is with openerp-web 5.0.1
because of its dependency on TurboGears 1.0.8 . TurboGears 1.0.8 is not
supported with the default Ubuntu 9.04 python version (python2.6)

OpenERP Web client 5.0.2 is still under development.
This release is being migrated to CherryPy3 dropping the TurboGears
framework as a major step to make the Web Client much more faster and easier to deploy.
This will greatly reduce the pain of getting started with and deploying
of OpenERP Web client. The number of third party dependencies will be
reduced to 3-4 pure Python libraries. The initial test results offer almost 3-5 time speed improvement.

The
default openerp-server and openerp-web INIT scripts cannot launch their
corresponding services as non-root without fixing some technical
issues. I will detail what configuration files and scripts have to be
modified to avoid this.

Technical procedure. Initial installation and configuration

Upgrade of Ubuntu packages and installation of openerp and pgadmin:

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

$ sudo apt-get install openerp-server openerp-client pgadmin3

To avoid having some of the labels
untranslated in the GTK client, install the
language-pack-gnome-YOURLANG-base package. The following command
installs the spanish language pack:

$ sudo apt-get install language-pack-gnome-es-base

Postgres Database configuration:

$ sudo vi /etc/postgresql/8.3/main/pg_hba.conf

Replace the following line:

# “local” is for Unix domain socket connections only
local all all ident sameuser

with:

#”local” is for Unix domain socket connections only
local all all md5

Restart Postgres:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 restart

* Restarting PostgreSQL 8.3 database server [ OK ]

The following two commands will avoid problems with /etc/init.d/openerp-web INIT script:

$ sudo mkdir /home/openerp

$ sudo chown openerp.nogroup /home/openerp

Create a user account called openerp with password “openerp” and with privileges to create Postgres databases:

$ sudo su postgres

$ createuser openerp -P

Enter password for new role: (openerp)

Enter it again:

Shall the new role be a superuser? (y/n)n

Shall the new role be allowed to create databases? (y/n)y

Shall the new role be allowed to create more new roles? (y/n)n

Quit from user postgres:

$ exit

exit

Edit OpenERP configuration file:

$ sudo vi /etc/openerp-server.conf

Replace the following two lines (we
don’t force to use a specific database and we add the required password
to gain access to postgres):

db_name =
db_user = openerp
db_password = openerp

Troubles with Python releases: Python
2.6 is not yet supported by OpenERP 5.0, but it is the default Python
release on Ubuntu 9.0.4. We need to launch OpenERP 5.0 with Python 2.5
or earlier. There’s also a problem with python-xml package in Ubuntu so
we will reinstall it.